Yes, GTK is faster. The GTK-rewrite part was the easier part.
The challange was to support skype calls as well. I don't know
if I did it the right way, but it works. Many other developer
tried and searched for a way to accept/reject skype calls,
and didn't find an answer, so at the beginning I didn't
know if it would be possible at all.
But finally I found a way.

-the code is ugly
-the UI is ugly
-skype call handling only works if your are already connected
when starting this*.
- needs much more testing.
- no rotation support

I would be happy when someone can take over this project,
as I don't have the time to develop this further.

[*] This is a statusbarplugin, so you have to connect to skype
and then restart hildon-status-menu.
It isn't that difficult to listen to connection changes and register
the listener, so that this works even after connecting/disconnecting
to skype. I was just to lazy to do it the proper way.

Nicolai